Aimee Terese responds to my post about her with warmed-over MRA talking points

Australian podcaster and putative leftist Aimee Terese has annoyed a lot of people on Twitter with her bizarre attack on freelance journalist Talia Jane for going public with the gross DM she’d gotten from a male journalist, suggesting to Jane that she was so ugly that she should feel flattered that anyone would even “contemplate ejaculating on [her face].”

No, really.

Turns out that Terese is not quite as thick-skinned as she expects her targets to be, and she was evidently herself annoyed by the post I wrote yesterday about her anti-Talia-Jane tweetstorm.

First, she responded with a flurry of buzzwords:

Futrelle's brand of liberal maximalism is entirely discursive. He thinks in idealistic terms of good and bad people, free floating feelings, and that silencing speakers with bad ideas solves political problems.

Then, perhaps realizing that calling someone excessively “discursive” was not quite the killing rhetorical blow she had hoped it would be, she tried again:

Now this tweet I understand, because I have seen so many different variations of these, er, arguments used against me by so many Men’s Rights Activists over the years.

I’m a White Knight? I’ve certainly heard that before.

And apparently when I’m not white knighting women I am “step[ping] on the necks of dissenting women” like Terese. Never mind that I only wrote about her because she viciously attacked a women for reporting apparent sexual harassment; clearly I’m being the hateful one here.

This, again, is the same sort of nonsense I’ve heard from MRAs every time I’m said anything critical about antifeminist women — often with a bogus “gatcha” attached: You say you’re a feminist, yet here you are criticizing a woman!

Fans of Cassie Jaye, the director of the Red Pill documentary, widely panned by feminists as a whitewash of the misogynistic Men’s Rights movement, tend to be the most enthusiastic about this particular rhetorical strategy. They also like to conflate writing about someone on a blog with harassment — just as Terese turned “mentioning someone in a blog post” into “stepping on someone’s neck.”

Terese doesn’t just ape the rhetorical tricks of the MRAs; she also seems to agree with them about certain things. Or at least to agree with Jordan Peterson, something of an idol for many MRAs. Last year, as Terese reminded me yesterday, she took issue with my suggestion that incel forums, breeding grounds for violence and misery, should be shut down if possible.

Her solution to the incel problem? Aside from vague talk about ending capitalist alienation by ending capitalism itself, this is the only specific suggestion she offered:

Now, I don’t think she’s literally suggesting that every incel in the world be awarded an “attractive, eligible” Palestinian woman of his own; she later clarified that she had offered this suggestion “not as an answer in itself, but more as an example of creative thinking.”

But this “creative thinking” isn’t really so creative after all; it sounds an awful lot like Jordan Peterson’s “enforced monogamy” and/or economist Robert Hanson’s “sex redistribution,” ersatz “solutions” to “sexual inequality” that would require imposing some sort of sexual tyranny on the women of the world, some of whom would have to be cajoled or threatened or coerced into having sex with the sort of guy who thinks shooting up a mall is an appropriate response to not being able to get laid.

If you’re a socialist who sounds this much like an MRA, you really need to start rethinking your socialism.

We Hunted the Mammoth is independent and ad-free, and relies entirely on readers like you for its survival. If you appreciate our work, please send a few bucks our way! Thanks!

Comments

@kupo:
The more I read that quote, the more I think that what she’s really trying to say is,

Futrelle’s brand of liberal maximalism is entirely without effect on the real world. It’s all talk (discourse) and no substance (policies that might have real-world impact).

And, indeed, a blogger – like a journalist (and David is both) – might really be “all talk” in that sense. But it’s the job of a blogger or a journalist to talk about what’s going on. It may be that this doesn’t solve the problem on its own, but the public identification of a problem is necessary in order to put political pressure on decisions makers to actually solve the problem.

David’s role is a necessary one in a democratic society, even a democratic republic where representatives make decisions on behalf of a population rather than an Athenian-style direct democracy where votes are held, open to every citizen, on every specific question that might result in a new law or policy. So I don’t mind if his work is less practical and more “discursive”.

But if you’re going to criticize “maximalism” as “not practical” then there is an easy way to describe this, and it doesn’t involve the use of the word discursive:

Pie in the sky.

But we shouldn’t expect Terese to know how to communicate: communication has been proven by academics to be excessively discursive.

I’d love to socialize in more places but life has me in driveby mode on internet. Shortish answer: The name is a reference to the Ayatollah of Iran calling America “The Great Satan” (something like Shaytan e Bozorg). I adopted it when I thought his comments were all about hating cool stuff like rock and gay people.

But since learning more about our role in Iran’s history, I’m kinda like do I change this? But I’m still USian and still satanic, so maybe not. I think the Canadian Satan retired. I sorta knew the guy.

If these criticisms aren’t related to each other, if they are just multiple things about David she dislikes, listing one, then another, then another, then, well, isn’t that the very definition of discursive you mention?

I think it’s exactly that. She may claim to be a lefty, but she’s got the IOKIYAR mindset down pat.

Crip Dyke, I think that’s part of it, I’m “just writing things” rather than doing “material” real-world activism like, I guess, forcing women (Palestinian or otherwise) to marry men? (And on that note, damn, I hadn’t read the details on that PLO program and it was somehow even worse than I expected.)

She might also mean that I write about people’s ideas rather than material conditions and I guess I have to plead mostly guilty to that, although I do keep in mind the social/political/economic/gender etc conditions (and the assorted material and other inequalities) that underly the ideas I write about. I just don’t think it’s all about class. I mean, obviously, given that I’m writing a blog about misogyny and white male rage.

I still don’t know what “liberal maximalism” is or what “splitting” has to do with anything. (And I don’t think I’m splitting apart, although I have gotten a little wider in recent years.)

Maximalism is a term used in the arts, including literature, visual art, music, and multimedia. It is used to explain a movement or trend by encompassing all factors under a multi-purpose umbrella term like expressionism. It describes a quality of excessive redundancy oft exhibited by way of the overt accumulation of appurtenances that reflect current society. In other references the term refers to either the ostentatious displays of the extensive possessions of the super-rich or the obsessive collecting as frequently found in the behavior of garage sale shoppers who accumulate common household goods past reason. The term maximalism is sometimes associated with post-modern novels, such as by David Foster Wallace and Thomas Pynchon, where digression, reference, and elaboration of detail occupy a great fraction of the text. It can refer to anything which is excessive, overtly complex and “showy”, or providing redundant overkill in features and attachments, grossness in quantity and quality and maximalism the tendency to add and accumulate to excess.

As for splitting:

Splitting occurs when the only views someone accepts are extreme ones. A person that exclusively focuses on the positive or negative, or one that cannot bring together their opposing views is likely to split off

It was a Freudian defense mechanism, and though one can split in how one views oneself (“I’m a perfect parent, but I’m the worst doctor in the world, I don’t know how why the hospital still grants me admitting privileges!”), it’s typically used in popular media (rather than the professional psych literature) to describe a dynamic where an individual associates all good things with themselves and all bad things with some other person or group. (“My political party fights for freedom and our country, that other political party stands for literally nothing except tyranny and death!”) Generally it is not meant to describe situations where a political or opinion divide is accurately described but good/bad connotations are added. If that were true, then any time you believed passing House Bill 232 was better than not passing HB 232, then merely accurately describing people as “against HB 232” would be splitting. That’s obviously not what is meant by the term which is intended to describe an irrational process that substitutes for objective assessments by first determining who is good and who is bad and THEN attributing qualities to persons in each of those groups according to the group in which they belong. Thus saying that someone opposes abortion rights and are therefore anti-freedom is not splitting. Saying someone is an evil, anti-freedom republican and therefore must be opposed to abortion rights may very well be splitting.

Despite originating with Freud, the concept lives on because it has some utility – even if not the exact utility ascribed to it by Freud himself. I’m fairly certain that it is this form of “splitting” that Terese had in mind in this tweet. It’s actually more reasonably used (“reasonable” in that it fits what she’s trying to say, not that it’s necessarily accurate), IMO, than “discursive”.

But what do I know? I’m probably just splitting and calling her unreasonable on the basis of her being my rhetorical opponent.

Crip Dyke, ok, that’s helpful, especially the splitting stuff, though I’m not sure that, er, “Gaylordio” is using it correctly? But maybe he is? Maybe he’s saying that I assume I’m perfect and that MRAs are all evil misogynists but what if they’re the perfect ones and I’m the evil misogynist checkmate feminists!!1!

I’m still baffled as to what LIBERAL maximalism might be. That I’m liberal but with lots of semi-ironic David Foster Wallace footnotes?

Gee, Aimee (whoever the hell YOU are), that’s a lot of words for saying you’re an MRA bootlicker who believes in assigning unwilling wives to unlikable assholes. People dislike your politics because YOUR POLITICS ARE SHIT.

@Rhuu: thank you for the kind welcome. My welcome package was fanstastic!! Did everyone get an assortment of soy products, a onesie pajama and a non-active participant video game profile? Ha ha ha. I will put my gifts to good use, I promise.

more examples in this thread of how the identitarian left are literally calling out the actual left for having a dissenting opinion. This is neo-liberalism at it’s finest, propping up capitalist individualism, and purging itself of it’s actual materialist foundations.

Oh yes, because a woman who claims to be a Marxist while pushing ideals antithetical to Marxism, who claims to be a feminist while telling women they should just “shut the fuck up” instead of speaking out against sexual abuse, and a self-proclaimed leftist who shares 80% of her political views with the alt-right & MGTOWs is “someone on the *actual* left with a dissenting opinion,” and not a lying hypocrite.

She did lie, by the way; and she’s as much an “identitarian” as the other MRAs. Besides being an actual misogynist, the only other thing she talks about is how Marxist she supposedly is (while making things up, pushing capitalist ideals, and using words she doesn’t understand to sound more bourgeois).

Donate to the Mammoth!

We Hunted the Mammoth is an ad-free, reader-supported publication written and published by longtime journalist David Futrelle, who has been tracking, dissecting, and mocking the growing misogynistic backlash since 2010, exposing the hateful ideologies of Men’s Rights Activists, incels, alt-rightists and many others.

We depend on support from people like you. Please consider a donation or a monthly pledge by clicking below! there's no need for a PayPal account.

Send comments, questions, and tips for stories to me at dfutrelle@gmail.com, or by clicking here